None of us had all of the campaign notes, because it’s been a couple of months and our schedules have been horribly clashing. So… we had to wing it. Fortunately, at least two of us had already played 7th Sea, which meant that almost all the stuff that we were looking up was rules-related, not setting-related. It’s much easier to fake rules than the world, possibly because you can always say ‘You got away with it that time’ and it won’t really damage the overarching story.
It also helps that I try to GM pretty collaboratively. Which is ever so much nicer than saying that I’m a lazy GM who doesn’t mind it when my players come up with the sleazy rationalization on the fly for why something improbably happened. If you have players like those…, treasure them.